The invention relates to the field of information retrieval (IR).
Many information retrieval tasks involve retrieving documents based on multiple search terms, each searched for in many electronic documents. Each document may include multiple fields, each with a document field index, such as a tag, and a field text content. For example, searching for terms in the author, title, and abstract field among multiple documents. Each search term may include a search field index and a text string, the search field index indicating the document field to search in each electronic document for the text string. For example, a search term may be directed to search in an author name field for a text string “Tom Jones”, a second search term may be directed to search in a keyword field for a text string “valve failure”, and these terms are searched for in multiple electronic documents, such as a corpus of electronic documents. Within each document the search terms are searched for in the document author field, the document keyword field, and the like. Thus searches are performed routinely in medical record databases, maintenance systems, patent databases, academic journal articles, newspaper articles, online shopping sites, problem management records, and the like.
Methods for searching multiple fields of documents, such as multi-field searches, structured queries, or the like, may be performed using basic IR scoring techniques, such as field concatenation techniques, field combination techniques, divergence from randomness techniques, probabilistic techniques, fusion techniques, and/or the like.
The foregoing examples of the related art and limitations related therewith are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of the related art will become apparent to those of skill in the art upon a reading of the specification and a study of the figures.